Car Crash
I was about two hours east of Carson, Nevada, when I noticed the bloom of black smoke on the horizon.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been on Route 50, but they call it the “Loneliest Road in America” for a reason. It's just mile after mile of endless desert, so when something unusual appears, it immediately catches your eye.
To keep myself sane and awake, I’d been listening to one of my wife’s ‘smut’ books, supposedly a tale about a guy tasked with fulfilling a prophecy but in reality just page after page of really steamy sexual encounters with fairy princesses. Definitely not my usual go-to, but being surrounded by that dull landscape, I was desperate for something to stimulate my brain.
At first, I thought the smoke might be related to some kind of oil well or an installation that was maybe flaring off extra gas. But as I got closer, I saw the wink of the hot sun on broken glass and twisted bits of metal, and that’s when I realized it was a car crash.
Out in the middle of nowhere, it was no surprise that I was the first one to arrive at the scene. The light blue sedan had gone 75 yards off the highway, hit a dry arroyo and flipped over. I’m no crime scene expert, but it was obvious even to me that the driver had been driving pretty fast for the car to be as smashed up as it was.
I pulled over the van I was driving and hopped out. Immediately, I was hit by the acrid smell of the smoke, which smelled like death. The front half of the car was burning like crazy, sending out waves of superheated air that made me gasp. There was also a tang of chemicals in the air that made me think that perhaps the antifreeze or windshield wiper fluid was being vaporized.
Obviously, there was no way I could extinguish the fire, but what caught my attention was the body of an elderly man lying on his back about 50 feet from the car. I ran over and saw that his face was badly lacerated and bleeding heavily. Frankly, he looked like he was already dead, but when I checked the side of his neck for a pulse, I detected faint signs of breathing.
“Hang on, mister,” I said, grabbing him by his ankles and dragging him over to a narrow depression in the sand, worried that the car might explode at any moment and wipe us both out.
I then knelt down beside him, my mind racing as I tried to figure out what to do next. I’d taken a first aid course back when I was a teenager in order to get my lifeguard certificate, but this guy was clearly in need of professional medical assistance.
“I’m gonna go get my phone to call 911,” I told the old man, but just as I was turning to head off, he reached out and grabbed my hand, his grip surprisingly strong.
“No, wait,” he wheezed, his eyes bulging from the effort of speaking.
“You’re too heavy for me to carry back to my van,” I told him. “I think the paramedics are your only hope.”
Although the truth was that I was pretty sure the nearest ambulance was probably an hour or more away. I just didn’t know what else to tell the old guy.
“My girls...” said the man, one of his ears so mangled that it looked like raw hamburger.
“Girls?” I said, confused.
If there were any passengers in that car, they were toast. I could already hear the paint sizzling as it fried on the exterior of the front of the crashed vehicle. Anybody still trapped in there was going to be a carbonized skeleton.
“My girls...” said the man, his hand trembling badly as he pointed.
I stood up and looked in the direction he was indicating, and that’s when I saw two young women with long black hair huddling together in the scant shade of a buckhorn cholla cactus. They were a good distance from the wreck, but even so, I could see that they were both completely naked. But since they were standing upright, I figured they weren’t in any immediate danger.
“Yes, I see them,” I told the old man, my overheated brain scrambling to process the strange situation.
“You...” said the old man, squeezing my wrist. “You have to... take them home.”
“Sure, sure, of course,” I said, meaning every word of it, too.
Why wouldn’t I? I’d just arrived on the scene of a terrible accident. I had no idea what had caused it, but the two girls had survived, so of course I was going to get them to safety. It’s what any decent human being would’ve done.
“Rachel...” said the old man, his fierce eyes locked on me.
“One of your girls is named Rachel?” I said, trying and failing to discreetly pull back my hand from his iron grip.
“No!” hissed the old man, droplets of blood flying from his mouth. “Rachel... is their home.”
“Ah, you’re from Rachel, Nevada?” I said, having vaguely heard of the town during my travels even if I’d never been there before.
“Yes,” said the old man, nodding even as his throat made awful, wet gurgling noises.
“Sure thing, sir,” I said. “Now if you’ll let me go, I can go call 911 and...”
“One more thing!” said the old man, his swollen, purple tongue sticking out of his mouth from the effort.
“Um, sure,” I said, feeling more and more creeped out by the minute even though I knew it was wrong to feel that way about someone on the verge of dying.
“Do not...” said the old man, pausing as a series of convulsions ran through him. “Do not...”
“Do not what?” I said, leaning forward so I could hear him better.
“Do not... have sex with them,” said the old man, slumping back and finally releasing his hold on my wrist.
“Seriously?” I said with a bit of a sarcastic chuckle.
Did the old man take me for a pervert or what? Of course I wasn’t going to take advantage of his girls like that. The thought had never even crossed my mind. Even if they were international supermodels, they’d just been in a car crash and were no doubt in a state of shock.
But I never got a response from the old man. I went ahead and checked his pulse just to be sure, but he was definitely dead. I’d never really seen anybody die like that in front of me, and I never wanted to again. Yet there was not much more I could do for him, so I got to my feet and went to go check on the girls.
As I got closer to them, I became more and more puzzled. Unlike their dad, or more likely their grandfather, neither of them had a scratch on them, their pale skin completely unblemished.
They appeared to be about the same age, so at first I thought they were twins, but then I saw that they weren’t, at least not the identical kind, just two sisters the same age.
“Hello,” I said, giving him a friendly wave as I approached, trying not to look at their intimate areas, especially because they looked to be teenagers or maybe in their freshman year at college at best.
But there was no response from either one of them even though their green eyes were tracking my every move.
“I’m sorry about the crash, and your grandpa,” I said, my gaze moving back and forth between them. “My name’s Tom. What’s your name?”
Again, though, neither of them said anything even though they seemed quite alert, and there was no mistaking the intelligence behind their eyes.
“Do you speak English?” I said, wondering if maybe that was the issue. “Habla, um... espanol?”
There was no response to that either, which puzzled me. I looked around, trying to figure out why both girls were completely naked, but I couldn’t see any discarded clothes or personal items. Had they been travelling naked in the car when it crashed? That didn’t make any sense.
“My van is right over there,” I said, turning and pointing at my vehicle. “I can take you home if you want.”
Once again, though, the girls just stood there and stared at me, saying nothing. Then the one on the left shared a glance with the one on the right, making me wonder if I was witnessing some of that twin telepathic communication I’d heard about.
“Your grandpa said you live in Rachel,” I said. “Is that right?”
The girls, though, continued to just stare at me as if I were some kind of entertainment or something, which thoroughly puzzled me. They didn’t look frightened or in shock at all. It was more as if this was all one big game to them.
“Look, you’re going to fry out here in this sun if you don’t come with me,” I said, holding out my hand. “Don’t worry. I promise I’ll get you home safe.”
That’s when they spoke for the first time, and it was me who was left in a state of shock.
